Note: This event ended on Friday, December 22. This question is now closed to prevent submissions of new answers.

Due to a rather unfortunate series of events that can be directly attributed to a surplus of egg nog, the company that provides our hat rentals has requested that we immediately return them without refund. We can't really get into the particulars of what went down, but we did our best to explain to them that I couldn't have known that a moose would react that way to silly putty.

Because of this, we need your help. We need to come up with approximately 20 - 30 more hat designs. Sounds pretty simple, right?

There is one tiny caveat (from an email I received earlier today from Jay Hanlon, VP of Holiday Cheer):

... because of holiday vacation schedules, we're short on people, so our kids are going to be doing most of the work on getting the new hats into the system. The designs will have to be done using crayon, construction paper, finger paints, water colors, popsicle sticks, paste & glue and other sorts of materials. Let them know that we don't recommend silly putty if they happen to be working near a moose.

That's right, you'll need to make hats that exist in the physical realm, from materials that aren't generally thought of as being choking hazards, suitable for developers ages 3 and above.

You'll need to provide at least one photograph of your creation as an answer to this question in order to qualify to win a box full o' swag containing a T-shirt and stickers and at least some of the following items:

Nalgene water bottles

Notebooks

Sharpies & Other SE/SO branded office supplies

Stickers from various SE sites

Whatever else might be haunting our warehouse

The top voted hats may or may not be used as the basis of secret hats near the end of Winter Bash this year, or as totally new hats next year. We just can't say. We're talking silly putty and a moose here people, everything is up in the air at this point. I accept full responsibility for this.

Here are the rules:

You must come up with a creation that represents (in some way) a hat, consisting of artistic mediums that are not run as computer applications and suitable for children 3+ years of age. You can use Photoshop or Paint, but you'll have to print it and make it part of something else.

You must upload at least one picture of your creation, and provide any background or context needed for others to appreciate its brilliance. We suggest including only the hat in the image (though background 'noise' is fine), remember that all contributions are CC-BY-SA.

All submissions must be family friendly and adhere to our be nice policy.

Employees (former and current) may submit an entry, but won't be eligible to win swag. I MEAN HOW MUCH SWAG DO YOU GREEDY PEOPLE ACTUALLY NEED?!

Answers must maintain an aggregate positive score to qualify. All answers that have a net zero or positive score at the end of the contest will win.

Contents of prize packages may vary, depending on availability of items; every effort to ensure equal value of all packages will be made.

You are responsible for the creation and execution of your design. If you fancy lasers and explosions and things get out of hand, it's not our fault.

Want to join in on the fun? Get your smock, grab some clay & finger paints and get to designing!

Note: We're not really giving back all of the hats, we're just pretending to so we can have some formerly age-appropriate fun

Update:

Thank you all for the amazing submissions! Not only did you help make the holiday a bit brighter for everyone, you've inspired quite a few of next year's hats!

Everyone that submitted a positively scored submission will receive a care package (even if it went in a tad after the ending); we'll be reaching out to you soon. However, we're no longer accepting submissions.

Happy holidays, everyone!

You should have received an email by now :)

We've contacted everyone eligible to get something, if you didn't get something and think we might have missed you, make sure you check your spam folder and if nothing is there, contact us and let us know. Seriously, though, please check your spam folder - Hotmail and others are notorious about tossing stuff in the bin even from trusted contacts if the same email is sent to more than a few people using it.

This question appears to be off-topic. The users who voted to close gave this specific reason:

"The problem described here can no longer be reproduced. Changes to the system or to the circumstances affecting the asker have rendered it obsolete. If you encounter a similar problem, please post a new question." – Tim Post

Just checking -- we're allowed to use grown-up tools like circular saws and lasers if we want to, but any damage (from moose or otherwise) is our problem, right?
– Monica Cellio♦Dec 14 '17 at 16:47

22

To everyone worried that its hat design is not safe for "children age 3+" I want to remind you that Gilbert U-238 Atomic Energy Lab was totally safe for children usage, so fell free to use all the spare Uranium isotopes you have still stored in the fridge form the last time you tried to conquer the world and give your hat a nice radioactive-green glow-in-the-dark-and-not-just-in-the-dark shiny look .
– SPArchaeologistDec 14 '17 at 16:48

We're just getting back from the holiday. Hang tight, we should be in touch with everyone next week :)
– Tim Post♦Jan 4 '18 at 17:08

11

I just talked to the folks in our operations department and they are going to try extremely hard to get in touch with everyone this week and get shipments underway. Hang tight :)
– Tim Post♦Jan 17 '18 at 16:03

8

Anyone waiting for their swag, please keep an eye out here for updates.
– animuson♦Feb 21 '18 at 21:26

@ShadowWizard, then you have more time to do what is needed to do in this website. I was making a small hat, my lil one see it and she wanted to make it special so she finished all my hot glue sticks and all her toy gems >.<
– AaADec 22 '17 at 7:55

1

lol... well my daughter also wanted to make a paper hat first, but daddy (that's me ;)) didn't know how to make one, so we went on something more simple... :D
– Shadow WizardDec 22 '17 at 9:00

well my hat was also a crown but yours look 100 times better , Great efforts.
– Manohar ReddyDec 22 '17 at 12:43

Our site is a hat. We want our hat-site hat.

a.k.a. "all teh physics!"

Suppose you had a Hatters Stack Exchange. Then Winter Bash would be like a national holiday on steroids, no? Now suppose you had a Stack Exchange whose logo is, already, a hat. Then you'd expect the Winter Bash to show the physics some love and throw in a Mexican-hat-potential-logo-styled hat into the mix. But so far, no joy.

So, without further ado:

Materials: white paper, scissors, stapler, green whiteboard marker. (If you're feeling particularly into things, you might even plump in a plush Higgs boson (or some other such representation) on the outer rim of the hat, much like its fundamental-particle's natural home.) In terms of graphical assets, you have them already:

The physical representation might look, to an untrained eye, to be of relatively low accuracy. If that is bugging you, then you might not have grasped just how loose of an attachment to accuracy we physicists can quite easily lapse into when we say "yeah, this is definitely not a harmonic oscillator ( / quadratic potential) but let's pretend it is anyway".

As for triggering behaviours... oh, golly, how about just visiting Physics Stack Exchange on some important physics date? Or posting or other nontrivial participation? If you want to up the bar on the participation requirements, then it might also be nice to extend the opportunity to, say, the physics and mathematical-physics tags on Math SE and indeed any tag on any site that includes the string 'physics'.

@Mithrandir Must? I’m also a moderator. Might be me, but somehow I don’t really grasp what “security reasons” you might be thinking about. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to step on your toes or anything – after all, it’s your personal choice… but I’m curious about the reasoning of your security reasons (maybe I’m missing something that a heads-up could point me to).
– e-sushiDec 17 '17 at 9:44

2

@e-sushi - it was rather intended to be a joke. Honestly, I just didn't want to post a public picture of my face.
– MithrandirDec 17 '17 at 9:47

@Mithrandir lol – didn’t immediately get the joke. ;) Probably the result of interacting too much with tin-foil hatted peeps. Anyway, now that I grasp the motivation behind that image redaction, I’ll upvote your privates. (pun intended) Nice talking to you btw. Cya around.
– e-sushiDec 17 '17 at 9:51

Hah, @Mr_Green, just reading that "handsome face" and seeing the picture, I knew that it would be Harry's video. The 3rd part (released just a few weeks back) would have been more perfect though.
– Bhargav RaoDec 19 '17 at 23:55

It also is created with the artistry and skill of a 2 year old (although I assure you I am older than that).

This should be for questions or answers that get at least 2 votes in 2 minutes, asked or answered by someone who has been a member for at least 2 years. And then they say "D'oh!" and make a minor edit.

Simply because we tend to have smart, lazy 3 year olds (and toddlers tend to cover things given the chance), and I think adorableness can often make up for a lack of skills (cause many of these hats are excellent) ...

"Link only flags." don't exist, how are you going to determine when one has been raised? NAA flags aren't quite the same, and custom mod flags can be for other stuff as well.
– EKonsDec 16 '17 at 18:12

@ΈρικΚωνσταντόπουλος that's mod flag agree. But why Can't it be considered ?
– The DictatorDec 16 '17 at 18:13

2

I really think this should be for closing a question as going shopping.
– hatDec 16 '17 at 18:17

[...] a hat, consisting of artistic mediums that are not run as computer applications and suitable for children 3+ years of age

Ans: Check. (I sat with my 4yo niece [nickname: "Titli", meaning, a small butterfly] to jointly come up with the "design", she gets as much credit as me, if not more).

You must upload at least one picture of your creation, and provide any background or context needed for others to appreciate its brilliance. We suggest including only the hat in the image (though background 'noise' is fine), remember that all contributions are CC-BY-SA.

Ans: Check. (Though not very high quality)

All submissions must be family friendly and adhere to our be nice policy.

Ans: Check.

You are responsible for the creation and execution of your design.

Ans: Check. (Already feeling the heat, total responsibility, I now have 20+ orders for Christmas party for her schoolmates)

A crown made out of popsicle sticks and glue, as requested! I ran out of glue, so I had to cut the project short (I was going to have five logos surrounding the pentagon, but two will have to do.) and tie up the ring with ropes. (Carving holes in them in the right regions for the stand-up poles and for the ropes were hard.)

This hat consists of a 15 foot extension cord carefully wound into a shape that will fit on one's head as a hat. In theory it seemed like a good idea, in practice it was harder than I had hoped. To be honest, without a frame or structure, making a cord have a shape took some time.

Garbage Collector hat

Update: Refinement 1 !!!

I printed some logos and some "logo"s and glued one onto my "hat". It looks more like a GC now!

If you like it, you can grab the logo here and print it (Dimensions: 790x332).

Background

In Chinese, because of the (in)famous "National Matriculation Examination" (Chinese: 高考), students in Senior Middle Grade 3 (= United States Grade 12) always have a lot of assignments, most of which are printed papers (instead of well-stamped, published books). Due to the burdening load, assignments on these papers are rarely finished before they ever had a second chance to be reviewed again. This creates a tremendous amount of paper waste, despite the fact that almost every single school uses recycled paper for pointing these materials (white papers are only used to print formal documents). Besides directly throwing away, school guys have various ways to entertain with and utilize these wasted paper, one of which is folding them into paper planes. Well, that's still a waste if they're thown from 6/F and not picked up later. A better way to utilize it is to fold it into throwaway bins, as illustrated by Image #3 above. If you invert it, you get a hat instead :) Very eco-friendly, isn't it?

What about developing?

Feel free to correct any mistakes in this section. I'm not a professional IT worker, just an ordinary student who started learning programming on his own since Winter 2010 (Age 10).

Garbage collector is an important part of many interpreted languages and OOP languages, including C#, Java, Python, Perl, English, Spanish, Arabic and Russian. It keeps the process' usage of memory in a reasonable amount by freeing objects that are not used anymore and finding lost keys for Tim Post. Without GC, a simple iterative program can eat up to 8GB of waffles in six to eight weeks. If that ever happens, you should totally drop the program and use jQuery. It's fast and simple.

Possible way to obtain this "hat"

Garbage Collector I: Raise 5 helpful flags on posts that are later deleted in a single day.

"Go Green - Say No To Plastic" Hat

This hat is created by using just an inverted paper bag. Simple, right? But it has a huge meaning to save the world. In this Winter Bash, we may spread the word to world for saving our mother earth.

Possible Triggers:

Since this hat is created to spread "Go Green" word to the world, we may award it to someone who shares a link to the post which is later visited by 3 different ip addresses.

Go green also means making the environment clean. We may award it to someone who flags 10 comments as 'no longer needed' and moderator marks them as useful.

What’s the problem with plastic bags?

In response to the problem of using plastic bags and accepting negative impacts on our environment, more and more countries are banning and regulating the use of plastic bags in supermarkets and retail outlets. The efforts of governments and retailers will be wasted if we do not help reduce the consumption of plastic bags.

In this Winterbash, we can spread this awareness to SE/SO community and can try to make our world a better place.

5 trillion plastic bags are produced yearly. Side by side, they can encircle the world 7 times.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which is a floating landfill of garbage in the Pacific twice the size of Texas, is mostly composed of plastic.

In 2008, a sperm whale was found beached in California. It died due to the more than 22 kilos of plastic found in its stomach.

Plastic will only start degrading after 700 years and will only fully degrade in 1000 years. This means that all the plastic that has ever been produced has not degraded yet.

Plastic bags remain toxic even after it breaks down. It doesn’t biodegrade, it photo-degrades. It means that after it degrades, it breaks down into smaller and smaller toxic bits of itself – and bleeds and contaminates the environment.

In the North Pacific Ocean, there are 6x more plastic debris than plankton.

Plastic bags are produced using petroleum, natural gas and other chemicals. Its production is toxic to the environment.

Here's one of the well-known quote from A Sand County Almanac (1949) written by Aldo Leopold who was a famous wildlife biologist and conservationist:

"We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect."

Edit: Here's the noise free version of the hat.

Disclaimer: The bag I used is the random paper bag which was available at my home. By usage of it, I am not promoting any brand, or any product belonging to that brand.